Tamar Herzig is the Konrad Adenauer Professor of Comparative European History at Tel Aviv University and PI of the ERC Advanced Grant Project “Female Slavery in Mediterranean Catholic Europe, 1500-1800” (2024-2029).

She is the co-winner of the Cherasco International Prize in History for 2024 for her book Storia di un ebreo convertito (Viella, 2023) and is the FuggiStoria Europa Prize winner in European History for 2023.

Her article “Slavery and Interethnic Sexual Violence: A Multiple Perpetrator Rape in Seventeenth-Century Livorno” (American Historical Review 127:1) won the 2022 Best Article Award of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender, and was awarded the Mediterranean Seminar’s Article of the Month Award for July 2022.

In 2021, she was awarded the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies’ Michael Bruno Memorial Award for groundbreaking research, for her contribution to the study of premodern history and especially of the Italian Renaissance.

In 2020 she won the American Historical Association‘s Rosenberg Prize and later on was awarded Honorable Mention of the Renaissance Society of America‘s Gordan Book Prize in Renaissance Studies (2021) for her book A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2019; Hebrew translation published by Magnes Press in 2023). For her work on religious conversion in early modern Italy, she also won the Kadar Award for Oustanding Research in 2019. 

Her earlier books include Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in Renaissance Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2008; Italian edition published by Carocci in 2014);  a book in Hebrew on the Italian Renaissance (2011; 2014); and  ‘Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman’: Lucia Brocadelli, Heinrich Institoris, and the Defense of the Faith (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2013).

 She is the co-editor of Ebraismo e cristianesimo in Italia tra ’400 e ’600: Confronti e convergenze [Special issue of Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà 25 (2012)]; of Knowledge and Religion in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Honor of Michael Heyd (Leiden: Brill, 2013); and of Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Her articles have appeared in Renaissance Quarterly; Sixteenth Century Journal; Renaissance and Reformation; Journal of Early Modern History; Church History; Religions; Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte; Genesis; Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft; I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance; Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà; Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo; Memorie Domenicane.

She has been the recipient of a George L. Mosse Fellowship, Hanadiv Postdoctoral Fellowship, Yigal Alon Fellowship for Outstanding Junior Faculty, Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, and of Israel Science Foundation research grants (in 2010-2013; 2015-2019; 2020-[2024]). In 2012, she was elected member of the opening group of the Young Academy of Israel (founded by the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities), and in 2013 she was awarded a Jean-François Malle one-year fellowship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence.

She had served as Renaissance Society of America‘s Discipline Representative for the field of Religion and as member of the editorial board of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance  and of the advisory board of Renaissance Quarterly.  She is currently member of the editorial board of the journals Mediterranean Historical Review and of the book series I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History, and also serves on the academic board of the Medici Archive Project (Florence). In 2014-2021, she served as Director of Tel Aviv University’s Morris E. Curiel Institute for European Studies and in 2021-February 2024 she served as Vice Dean for Research of the Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University.